Without
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Sasuke knows a trick to dealing with the pain.


**Title:** Without  
**Author:** Celeste  
**Feedback:** (yes!)  
**Theme:** Solitude  
**Universe:** Naruto  
**Pairing:** None  
**Rating:** PG  
**Word Count:** 1,239  
**Time:** 27 mins (without edits) 1 hour-ish (with)  
**Spoilers:** Er…Sasuke and barrel-ness suggested very, very vaguely.  
**Summary:** Sasuke knows a trick to dealing with the pain.  
**Dedication:** Pris, cuz she wanted Naruto for her gift fic. God I'm sorry.  
**A/N:** Very obviously, it has been waaaay too long since I paid attention to Naruto for me to be able to do this cleanly, so if the technical stuff of Sasuke's barrel-life is off, you have to forgive me. And seeing as to how I'm dumb, you should forgive me for everything else as well. Please? God I'm sorry. These notes don't make much sense, but then again, neither does the fic so at least these two elements match up. Apologies in advance for everything. Oh, and thanks to Kelly and Greg for all their help, despite my dumbness. --;;  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine. Otherwise NaruSasu would always, always be bickering and pettiness and cutesy snuggling afterwards.  
**Distribution:** Just lemme know.

* * *

Just because he thought of them as important people didn't mean he needed them to live.

Sasuke had been denied enough important things in his life to know that he could indeed survive, even when one after another, all of the things he considered precious were ripped away piece by piece.

It had happened enough times to him that he knew it was very possible to still be alive after they'd been taken away.

From there, it was only a matter of learning to get on without them.

And getting used to the pain.

That was the major trick.

You had to get used to it, so much so that the pain didn't stay as pain, that it became less of a physical ache so much as a rising feeling of nothingness.

You had to turn it into an abyss, you see.

Because once it was a great amount of nothing, that was when you could live without it.

That's what he'd done the first time, after he'd stumbled across the bodies of everyone dear to him on earth. After his brother made him relive countless times, the slaughter of those most precious to his young heart.

He'd survived that, after all. It had been unbearable at first, the sudden feeling of absolute solitude and the accompanying emotions of abandonment, shame, guilt, and disbelief.

There'd been so many feelings, all of which hurt so horribly.

He thought he'd die.

He remembered, during those days after, trying to close his eyes and wishing that he'd never be able to open them again, that he'd simply cease to be.

At the time, he thought he wouldn't be able to live without them. Every moment the pain made him feel like he wouldn't be able to survive.

But he did survive, and just as his brother had predicted, in the end, it was because he was too scared to die, to do anything that would speed the process up. He was a coward.

So all he had been left with were the feelings-- overwhelming emotions that made him shiver like a lost dog, every bit the foolish little brother he was accused of being.

He hadn't known what to do, being too besieged by these hopeless sentiments to function properly. He'd eventually reached the point where he'd been so desperate that he told himself-- convinced himself-- that if he ignored the emotions, if he allowed himself to be dead to them, they wouldn't be able to hurt him.

Perhaps he hadn't been able to perish in the truest sense of the word. He'd lacked the courage. He still did.

But he'd found another way.

He hadn't been able to kill himself, still had those fears of death despite the pain of living that had plagued him those years after the annihilation of everything dear, but in death's stead he'd found his alternative.

He'd learned how to turn it into nothing.

And that's how he knew that no matter how important something seemed, there was a way to live without it.

Turn it all into nothing.

Perhaps he didn't have the courage to truly kill himself, but in the face of that he had found a second best repentance for his cowardice.

He survived, but his life was no longer that- alive. It didn't belong to him because he had turned it into nothing, into an abyss of emptiness that swelled inside him, occupying the place where emotion should have been.

He would kill Itachi. For vengeance. For forgiveness.

That was the only something he allowed to be left behind for himself in the end. Everything else became nothing.

Maybe he had been unable to muster the courage to fight before, to battle Itachi towards an honorable death back when he was a child and everything precious had been bled away by that man's destructive curiosity.

He'd been too weak, too afraid. Those emotions, he'd had too many of them.

And after, he thought he wouldn't be able to survive without them, his family of precious people.

He hadn't known what to do, when the grief and solitude threatened to consume him.

But, being too cowardly to end his life, he forced himself to find something else. Another way.

And he did.

He made it all nothing.

It might have been an apology- the closest he could come to dying alongside his brethren was to sign his life away to the pursuit of death. Or it might have simply been his own selfish way of bottling his painful emotions without actually having to brave slitting his own throat.

But despite what may have been his prime motivation, in the end it was all the same. He felt nothing, lived in a state of un-life in order to stay living and pursue his revenge. He let that be the only goal he allowed himself. Everything he did moved towards that end and nothing else.

Other things might have been important, might have unintentionally become precious to him without his immediate knowledge and certainly without his consent, but he was skilled in the art of destroying those kinds of sentiments such that he might move forward without them, even if things of that fashion were to somehow happen, as they had.

He'd had to turn that into nothing too, to be where he was now.

He knew that no matter how important they had felt to him at one point, he would be able to do without them.

In the darkness of this confined space, he pushed past the warning pain that settled in his chest when he thought of them, and with the skill borne of much practice, forced it into nothingness. Alone in the dark here, unable to move, to see, left with nothing but the occasional trickle of his own thoughts, he knew that pushing them into that abyss was crucial.

Because, once free of this space, they would never forgive him.

It hurt a little bit at first.

But it was a feeling he was used to already-- this being torn from everything held most dear. He was well prepared for it, knew that it could be no more initially painful than when he had seen through his brothers' eyes the massacre of the only things that had ever made him feel alive. It couldn't be more painful than that because it was the same thing all over again, wasn't it? He'd already survived that before, had learned to continue living onward despite it, here in this existence of nothing.

When he escaped the narrow confines of this small, dark place, when he managed to burst free from here, he knew it would be the same thing all over again. They would be dead to him.

They would never forgive him.

He would become nothing to them. The thought hurt. At first, it hurt a little bit. But he had a trick, which he'd honed for many years now. It helped him survive, as cowardly, foolish, and selfish as it might have been.

You had to turn the pain into emptiness. That was the key.

So no matter how precious they were to him, he knew, he _knew_ that it was possible to live without them.

And knowing Naruto and Sakura as he did, as one tends to know those considered important, Sasuke knew without a shadow of a doubt that they too, would find a way to live without him.

**END**


End file.
